I would love to have whole-house UPS. (I'm not electrically ept, so I have no opinion on how the power is managed.) To be done right, it should be linked into the existing power outlets, each of which should be able to set a bit saying "UPS" or "normal". That would let me set the VCRs, computers, alarm clock, and very minimal lighting to be supported by the UPS without drawing power to run all the lights, major appliances, etc. If a power outage looked like it was going to be long, I could flip the bits for the fridge and the furnace to add them in. Obviously this would require a big honking battery or something, but that's just part of the cost of setup. For a house, as opposed to a hospital or office building, it ought to be possible to do this with batteries rather than generators, right?
That's how (electrical) solar systems work. They use a big bank of batteries that get charged up whenever there's sunlight. When there's not enough sun to run the house the batteries kick in.
Someone told me that half the 20k dollars to install a solar cell system was the battery set-up.
I haven't heard of a setup with outlets switchable between protected and unprotected, though it does sound like a useful idea (the more so if they can be configured remotely, without having to reach behind the fridge to get to the outlet it's plugged into). The way it's usually done is to have two colours of wall outletsnext to each other, with orange meaning UPS-protected.
As for skipping the generator, that depends on what you mean by "long". Most battery systems I've heard of (note that my research is several years out of date) are designed to keep things running for a minute or two while the generator starts, five to ten minutes to close files and shut down computers cleanly, ten to thirty minutes to figure out whether the outage will last long enough to warrant shutting everything down or to ride through a brief outage, or a couple of hours (rare, I think). Battery size seems to be customarily picked depending on load, to fit one of those profiles. I suppose if you had a "couple of hours" battery bank designed for a hospital and put it in your house instead, you could run the house for quite a while, but that's an amazingly expensive quantity of batteries. If you strip down to just the alarm clocks and VCRs, you could probably afford to have a day or two worth of power easily. I'm not sure about fridge or furnace though -- I'd have to find out how much they draw. (You only really need one of the two. If it's cold enough to really need the furnace, you can put food on the back porch to keep it cold.)
Again, what I know of standard practice and relative cost is based on old research. The economics may have shifted. But I don't think so.
The electrical code will put a crimp in some of your more grandiose plans. The "switchable outlets" are probably a no-no.
If you have a whole-house generator (or, presumably, battery system) you need a "transfer switch", which is an idiot-proof thingy that -- whatever idiocy you perpetrate within your house -- won't allow any of your backup power to leak back into the commercial power lines to kill the people working to repair them.
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Someone told me that half the 20k dollars to install a solar cell system was the battery set-up.
-m
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As for skipping the generator, that depends on what you mean by "long". Most battery systems I've heard of (note that my research is several years out of date) are designed to keep things running for a minute or two while the generator starts, five to ten minutes to close files and shut down computers cleanly, ten to thirty minutes to figure out whether the outage will last long enough to warrant shutting everything down or to ride through a brief outage, or a couple of hours (rare, I think). Battery size seems to be customarily picked depending on load, to fit one of those profiles. I suppose if you had a "couple of hours" battery bank designed for a hospital and put it in your house instead, you could run the house for quite a while, but that's an amazingly expensive quantity of batteries. If you strip down to just the alarm clocks and VCRs, you could probably afford to have a day or two worth of power easily. I'm not sure about fridge or furnace though -- I'd have to find out how much they draw. (You only really need one of the two. If it's cold enough to really need the furnace, you can put food on the back porch to keep it cold.)
Again, what I know of standard practice and relative cost is based on old research. The economics may have shifted. But I don't think so.
Backup Power
plans. The "switchable outlets" are probably a no-no.
If you have a whole-house generator (or, presumably, battery system)
you need a "transfer switch", which is an idiot-proof thingy that --
whatever idiocy you perpetrate within your house -- won't allow any
of your backup power to leak back into the commercial power lines
to kill the people working to repair them.